The Part I Didn't Hear
May first. Thursday. I left work about twenty minutes later than I meant to and got to the bus stop just in time to sit down next to an argument that was already in progress. I do…
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26 entries tagged #smallmoments.
What the Window Is Actually For
August twenty-fourth. The mug was cold by the time I noticed I'd stopped drinking it. That's what gave it away. I've been writing around this for most of the summer, the forty min…
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Fifteen Minutes I Didn't Count
March fourteenth. I found a photo on my phone that I'd forgotten I'd taken, or rather, forgotten the timer had taken, which is a distinction that matters because I wasn't trying t…
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Eleven Minutes on the Fire Escape
October twenty-second. The cat appeared between the second and third sip of my coffee. That is the most precise accounting I can give. One moment the fire escape outside the break…
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The Long Table
September eighth. Simone's birthday was last week and we did what we always do, which is find a table and refuse to leave it. I had booked the reservation for seven and by the tim…
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The Room Was Already Full
May twelfth. I have been trying to write this post for two weeks, and the problem is that it isn't really about the pigeon. The pigeon is a good story, it stayed the entire aftern…
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The Room I Didn't Know Was There
April twentieth. I had been to open studio before, enough times that the sign-in sheet felt familiar, and I knew which wheel had the wobble and which shelf was for pieces still wa…
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The Week After Thanksgiving
November twenty-ninth. The week after Thanksgiving is its own strange weather. Everything feels slightly deflated, the big meal behind you, December not quite arrived yet, the cit…
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The First One to Say It
July ninth. For years, the direction of knowing in this friendship has run one way. Simone names the frame, I receive it. She says the thing that's already true before I've found…
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Seven Minutes With the Menu
March twenty-first. The restaurant has about nine seats at the counter and I was the only one who came alone, which I did not fully think through until I sat down and realized the…
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The Part Where We Didn't Leave Yet
November twentieth. The class had been over for twenty minutes and we were still inside. It wasn't intentional. We walked out of the room and then stopped in the lobby and started…
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The Apple Morning
October eighteenth. The market runs along four blocks on Saturday mornings, and I've walked it enough times that I have habits inside it, which stall I hit first, which one I skip…
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What I Wrote Instead
July eleventh. It has been hot enough that I keep rearranging when I do things, morning errands before nine, everything else after six, the hours between treated like a room I'm n…
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The Woman Who Didn't Notice the Rain
May seventeenth. There was a woman on a bench across the path from us who was on a phone call so committed, so load-bearing, that when the first drops came she did not move. Not a…
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The Oat Milk Was Gone and We Took It Personally
May sixth. Here is what happened at the end of the shift: the coffee cart was out of oat milk. That's it. That's the whole incident. Simone looked at the cart, looked at me, and s…
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The Argument That Was None of Our Business
April fourteenth. There were two people at the bus shelter across from the coffee cart, and they were arguing. Not the low-hissing kind of argument you look away from, the private…
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The Algorithm Was Right
June tenth. Simone handed me her phone and said, just look at this, and the thing is she already knew the conversation was over. It was a Saturday afternoon. We'd gone for coffee…
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The Green Ink Problem
February twenty-third. There were three things in the mailbox: a power bill, a furniture store circular I did not ask for, and a letter addressed to someone named M. Okafor. I do…
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The Brochure I Didn't Throw Away
January third. I found it in my coat pocket when I was hanging the coat up, one of those tri-fold community center brochures, the kind with the slightly waxy paper and the clip-ar…
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What the Not-Saying Sounds Like
May sixth. We stayed for two hours. That wasn't the plan, the plan was food, a reasonable end-time, walking back to our cars without it becoming a whole thing, but then the conver…
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Two Seconds at the Coffee Cart
September sixth. She said something. That is the whole story, really, except that it isn't. We were both at the coffee cart before the Thursday shift, the one where you hand a dol…
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What I Did with the Two Seconds
August twenty-sixth. She said it at the coffee cart, which is where we say most things, the small aluminum setup near the side door, between the parking lot and the start of a shi…
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I Had a Whole Script
I'm not going to name the person. That's not what this is about. What this is about is the specific, humbling experience of having a conversation go completely differently than ev…
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Two Comments, One Ordinary Post
The post I published after the honest one was about spring cleaning. I mean that sincerely, I wrote four hundred words about going through my bathroom cabinet and throwing away a…
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Tuesday, 9:47pm
The cursor sat there for probably four minutes. I had the post open in the editor, the draft I've rewritten more times than I care to count, and I just, sat there with my hand on…
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Her Name Is Sophie
Her name is Sophie. That's it. That's the whole development. We found this out walking to the parking lot this morning, after the run, when she said something about the heat comin…
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